22 November, 2006

i've written about this on my personal blog, but i'll mention it here again... taking notes helps you remember stuff, so i like to do it even if i never look at my notes again.

not too long ago i interviewed with bill, a manager in the company i work for. while we were talking he took copious notes. while he was doing this he told me not worry, that he always does this even though he normally just throws his notes away.

under the guidance of this principle, i'd then like to write down the following idea from Fowler's UML Distilled:use cases help you determine requirements; and actors help you determine use cases.

i like the idea because it's simple, easy to remember, and it helps keep the end in mind.

21 November, 2006

the compnay i work for, and a lot of guys on my team have added the .net 2.0 framework to their boxes recently.

a lot of people have come to ask me either why their 1.1 web projects stopped working or why they can't get a 2.0 asp project to work. 9/10 times the problems arises because the box is trying to run asp 1.1 and 2.0 under the same app pool.

so, the answer to the problem is to make sure that at the very minimum all your 1.1 stuff is running under one app pool, and all of your 2.0 stuff is running under a different pool.

a lot of people have asked me why this is, and honestly, i don't know yet (but i'm looking)... i'll post a follow up as soon as i find out.

but there's an important lesson to learn here, not just some obscure fact about asp:solving this issues is actually easier than what one would think; all one has to do is look in the eventviewer, where the following error would be logged:

It is not possible to run two different versions of ASP.NET in the same IIS process. Please use the IIS Administration Tool to reconfigure your serverto run the application in a separate process.

it's been my experience that most devs don't look in the eventviewer, iis logs, etc, to find clues to their problems. as i've worked with BizTalk (and thus have been forced to look there) i've learned what great tools the eventviwer, the performance counters, and others are.